All the major hard drive companies make claims about their reliability of their drives, but when they are forced to perform in a datacenter the results are startling. Backblaze, a cloud backup company, has tens of thousands of hard drives in their datacenter to store their customers’ data. They use a wide array of hard drives from various manufacturers for their storage, and have released their results this year. Like last year’s results, HGST, a Hitachi brand, reigns supreme.

If you are in the market for new hard drives for your home computer or Network attached storage (NAS) then I suggest you look closely at the results. Some makes had over a 20% failure rate in 1 year, which is unacceptable for most, especially for enterprise of NAS storage. I can recommend Backblaze for cloud backup, because they are the company I use to backup my home systems.

One other interesting note, IBM has sold off many of its parts and they have become successful as parts of different companies. The Hitachi hard drives were part of IBM. The Thinkpad brand from Lenovo, which is considered by many business folks as the best laptops, were part of IBM. AT&T’s global network started out as IBM. The question is why IBM cannot make money on these when others can?